HR + FM = Teamwork

Even after the announcement of several COVID-19 vaccines, an ongoing focus on employee safety is vital to retaining and recruiting workers alike. By ensuring strong policies are in place to address workplace safety, organizations will improve wellness policies and ease employee concerns. To continue to address the challenges presented by the virus and future-proof facilities, organizations must optimize their usage of workforce management tools to improve processes and procedures.

Following a turbulent year, the use of workforce management tools allows business leaders to contain costs without increasing their workload holistically. Ultimately, allowing them to focus on other timely growth strategies, address new and historical risks, and maintain compliance through automation for enhanced facility risk management strategies. FMs, HR and business leaders can define risks in terms of the human aspect, determine the extent of the risk, and prioritize it.

Recently this has included ways to address standard procedures involving physical interactions, such as employees clocking in and out at the beginning and end of their shifts. Still a commonplace practice in many facilities, this poses a problem when the proximity of workers within high traffic spots can compromise an entire workforce’s safety. Even with additional risk and safety measures in place, there is still the possibility of COVID-19 and other contagious viruses spreading within the area by asymptomatic workers. Using workforce management solutions can enhance the cohesiveness between facility managers and HR professionals.

Reduce outbreaks

Biometric readers provide innovative solutions for highly secure environments; however, their use is limited when a job requires a mask or other personal protective equipment. Aligning with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, many businesses have instituted touchless clock-in practices, where feasible. Using alternative clockin processes that are still touchless and new hardware designed to scan employee temperatures produces safer working environments. Effectively reducing the spread of viruses among employees, progressive workforce management solutions provide a safeguard against potential wellness threats before a virus enters the worksite, providing peace of mind and enabling facilities to welcome more people within a space safely.

For the near future, workforce management tools need features such as:

• Accurate, multi-point temperature readings without needing to remove masks

• Real-time approval or rejection of employees’ temperature before entering a facility

• Elimination of human error with temperature taking and reporting, including touch-free clock functionality

• Recognizing and accurately identifying employees even while wearing masks

• Eliminate contact with shared devices in high-traffic areas

Additionally, being aware of how employees move through the workspace is vital in reducing the potential for an outbreak. Utilizing Bluetooth beacon badge technology, which already allows employees to clock in and out safely, helps FMs maintain social distancing, all while handling large amounts of employee data needed by HR professionals. This reduces organizations having to trust that employees will not gather during shift changes and breaks and improve the ability to perform contact tracing if needed, without having to use additional personnel.

For example, industrial services within areas experiencing an outbreak understand it is mission-critical for them to keep their employees safe and operations running to reduce supply chain disruptions. If there are 500 employees at every shift change, and to minimize gatherings, the organization decided to use a manual time system. While this may meet the objective of enhancing safety for clocking in and out, it does not assist with enforcing social distancing. The effort needed to manage and correct timecards would result in the need to hire additional employees to handle these new processes – costing tens of thousands of dollars in losses. This does not include the costs needed to monitor security cameras and spot checks to ensure employees wear masks and follow social distancing guidelines.

By integrating the use of wearable Bluetooth devices (i.e., within employee badges to assist with touchless clock in and out), HR and FM teams can track employee movements within the facility. This allows managers to be notifi ed when social distancing protocols are not being followed, while having an overview of ways to improve facility layout and shifts based on data. Distance monitoring using wearable technology can streamline contract tracing eff orts (if an employee does test positive), taking the guesswork out of which areas could be contaminated and require cleaning and whom the employee may have interacted with. This ensures exposed personnel are contacted in a timely manner, and sanitation protocols are adequately performed.

Improve scheduling

A system that meets the needs above provides valuable insight to enhance scheduling tactics, enabling organizations to hire additional employees to sustain future growth without violating social distancing protocols. After a year of embracing flexibility in scheduling shifts to adhere to occupancy and distancing regulations, this is still easier said than done for some organizations.

Without a clear-cut strategy for scheduling shifts, facilities will fail to meet the organization’s needs and adhere to union rules and jeopardize lives. For example, an employee scheduled to work at a specific job that they are not qualified for risks their safety as well as that of others around that position.

Aside from ensuring the right people are in the right roles, an effective shift-scheduling strategy involves incorporating staggered shifts, ample break times and extended work hours. With a customizable dashboard, organizations can institute rules-based scheduling to achieve this seamlessly using an automated tool. The scheduling solution automatically considers required certifications and skills, then schedules qualified employees who meet those requirements. Furthermore, this automation makes it easier to comply with staffing and safety rules and regulations that apply to specific industries and organizations. A rules-based scheduling tool limits overtime and fills gaps due to illness or absence. Overall, this technology helps organizations avoid over or under-scheduling to improve costs, minimize turnover and boost productivity.

Enhance communication

The majority of an organization’s miscommunication occurs due to language, transparency and psychological barriers. Seventy percent of business mistakes are the result of poor communication. As the circumstances around the pandemic continue to evolve, it is essential for workers, FMs and HR leaders to know what is happening, when it is occurring, and how it affects operations to reduce potential production delays. Therefore, leaders must ensure they are communicating eff ectively across the entire organization.

By optimizing communications eff orts through a single platform, FM and HR can efficiently reach employees across an organization, enabling both focus on other tasks to drive growth within the organization.

Verify compliance as regulation evolves

The process of verifying compliance with labor rules, regulations and health laws can require more than a thousand actions each month. The sheer volume of these necessary tasks can overwhelm personnel while putting operations at risk of incurring substantial fi nes and non-compliance penalties. With the use of automated tools, facilities can reduce the chances of human error while accelerating their compliance processes. For example, solutions can scan data and policies for compliance with all applicable safety regulations to reduce the risk of fines, penalties and reputational harm that comes with non-compliance.

This also includes training, as the pandemic has increased the need for timely instruction in health and safety standards and best practices. At the same time, it has altered how organizations can provide training for workers. As large in-person groups are challenging to conduct safely, organizations are leveraging learning management software to continue educating workers to ensure they remain in compliance with the required annual (and any new) training. With these customizable learning management systems, employees have access to standard courses to meet the needs of a wide range of industries and their specific roles.

Moving into this next phase of normalcy, HR and FM teams must continue leveraging implemented business contingency tactics. A robust workforce management solution can centralize crucial insight across an organization allowing FM and HR to work efficiently together. By taking a coordinated approach, organizations can enhance facility risk management by maintaining compliance through workforce management tools to safeguard employees against wellness threats and optimize operations by meeting staffing needs.